Archive for the 'Academics' category

Dr. Eric Lander, of the BROAD Institute, recently gave a toast honoring Jim Watson at the close of the Biology of Genomes meeting. See below Twitter thread from Jonathan Eisen for an archived video copy of the toast. (Picture via: Sarah Tishkoff tweet)

Lander has now apologized for doing so in a tweet:

Last week I agreed to toast James Watson for the Human Genome Project on his 90th birthday. My brief comment about his being “flawed” did not go nearly far enough. His views are abhorrent: racist, sexist, anti-semitic. I was wrong to toast. I apologize.

Last week I agreed to toast James Watson for the Human Genome Project on his 90th birthday. My brief comment about his being “flawed” did not go nearly far enough. His views are abhorrent: racist, sexist, anti-semitic. I was wrong to toast. I apologize.

I applaud Dr. Lander for this apology.

This comes after a bit of a Twitter storm. If you wonder why some people see value in using social media to advance progressive ideas*, this is one example.

Some key threads from

Jonathan Eisen

Well - for those who missed out on one of the most repulsive events in the recent history of genomics - here is an Instagram post of a video of Eric Lander toasting the racist, sexist, antisemitic Jim Watson https://t.co/vOPQKfmLLh 1/n

Since not everyone is aware of how awful a human Jim Watson is, and therefore doesn't appreciate how utterly revolting it is that Eric Lander, for entirely self-serving reasons, chose to celebrate him, read this account of his 2000 talk at @UCBerkeleyhttps://t.co/VOdMWfz0O9

One of the most amazing things in all of the twitter discussion over the weekend is that there are still people who want to try to claim that Watson's decades of abhorrent ranting about people he disdains, tied in many cases to the scientific topics he is discussing and in others to the people he thinks should be allowed or disallowed to participate in science, have nothing to do with public accolades "for his scientific accomplishments".

We've finally found out, thanks to Nature News, that the paltry academic salary on which poor Jim Watson has been forced to rely is $375,000 per year as "chancellor emeritus" at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The current NIH salary limitation is $181,500, this is the maximum amount that can be charged to Federal grants. I'm here to tell you, most of us funded by NIH grants do not make anything like this as an annual salary.

Should you be allowed to make an anti-Semitic remark? Yes, because some anti-Semitism is justified....Francis Crick said we should pay poor people not to have children. I think now we're in a terrible situation where we should pay the rich people to have children. If there is any correlation between success and genes, IQ will fall if the successful people don't have children. These are self-obvious facts.If I had been married earlier in life, I wouldn't have seen the double helix. I would have been taking care of the kids on Saturday.

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*Call it constantly angry performative social justice warrioring if you like. Whatever it takes. Just get er done.

All applicants for faculty positions at UCSD now required to submit a Contribution to Diversity Statement (aka Ideological Conformity Statements/Pledge of Allegiance to Left-Liberal Orthodoxy Statements) @chsommers@asheschowhttps://t.co/km67bbj4zn

to UCSD's policy of requiring applicants for faculty positions to supply a Statement of Contribution to Diversity with their application.

Mark J Perry linked to his own blog piece posted at the American Enterprise Institute* with the following observation:

All applicants for faculty positions at UCSD now required to submit a Contribution to Diversity Statement (aka Ideological Conformity Statements/Pledge of Allegiance to Left-Liberal Orthodoxy Statements)

Then some other twitter person chimed in with opinion on how this policy was unfair because it was so difficult for him to help his postdocs students with it.

It’s a deeply terrible idea to require this. If a student of mine was applying for faculty job there wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to advise them on this. Burden shouldn’t be on applicants https://t.co/fX89QMY3Mw

The Contributions to Diversity Statement should describe your past efforts, as well as future plans to advance diversity, equity and inclusion. It should demonstrate an understanding of the barriers facing women and underrepresented minorities and of UC San Diego’s mission to meet the educational needs of our diverse student population.

The page has links to a full set of guidelines [PDF] as well as specific examples in Biology, Engineering and Physical Sciences (hmm, I wonder if these are the disciplines they find need the most help?). I took a look at the guidelines and examples. It's pretty easy sailing. Sorry, but any PI who is complaining that they cannot help their postdocs figure out how to write the required statement are lying being disingenuous. What they really mean is that they disagree with having to prepare such a statement at all.

Like this guy Bieniasz, points for honesty:

The UCSD statement instructions (Part A) read like a test of opinions/ideology. Not appropriate for a faculty application

I am particularly perplexed with this assertion that "The UCSD statement instructions (Part A) read like a test of opinions/ideology. Not appropriate for a faculty application".

Ok, so is it a test of opinion/ideology? Let's go to the guidelines provided by UCSD.

Describe your understanding of the barriers that exist for historically under-represented groups in higher education and/or your field. This may be evidenced by personal experience and educational background. For purposes of evaluating contributions to diversity, under-represented groups (URGs) includes under-represented ethnic or racial minorities (URM), women, LGBTQ, first-generation college, people with disabilities, and people from underprivileged backgrounds.

Pretty simple. Are you able to understand facts that have been well established in academia? This only asks you to describe your understanding. That's it. If you are not aware of any of these barriers *cough*Ginther*cough*cough*, you are deficient as a candidate for a position as a University professor.

So the first part of this is merely asking if the candidate is aware of things about academia that are incredibly well documented. Facts. These are sort of important for Professors and any University is well within it's rights to probe factual knowledge. This part does not ask anything about causes or solutions.

Now the other parts do ask you about your past activities and future plans to contribute to diversity and equity. Significantly, it starts with this friendly acceptance: "Some faculty candidates may not have substantial past activities. If such cases, we recommend focusing on future plans in your statement.". See? It isn't a rule-out type of thing, it allows for candidates to realize their deficits right now and to make a statement about what they might do in the future.

Let's stop right there. This is not different in any way to the other major components of a professorial hire application package. For most of my audience, the "evidence of teaching experience and philosophy" is probably the more understandable example. Many postdocs with excellent science chops have pretty minimal teaching experience. Is it somehow unfair to ask them about their experience and philosophy? To give credit for those with experience and to ask those without to have at least thought about what they might do as a future professor?

Is it "liberal orthodoxy" if a person who insists that teaching is a waste of time and gets in the way of their real purpose (research) gets pushed downward on the priority list for the job?

What about service? Is it rude to ask a candidate for evidence of service to their Institutions and academic societies?

Is it unfair to prioritize candidates with a more complete record of accomplishment than those without? Of course it is fair.

What about scientific discipline, subfield, research orientations and theoretical underpinnings? Totally okay to ask candidates about these things.

Are those somehow "loyalty pledges"? or a requirement to "conform to orthodoxy"?

If they are, then we've been doing that in the academy a fair bit with nary a peep from these right wing think tank types.

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*"Mark J. Perry is concurrently a scholar at AEI and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan's Flint campus." This is a political opinion-making "think-tank" so take that into consideration.

There was a comment from girlparts on my prior post which triggered an anecdote from my past. It seemed worth having its own post. I guess in a way it is relevant to the broader question of how one should react if someone speaks disparagingly of "diversity hire" professors. This little experience certainly went into helping me to see yet another way that the Defenders Of Quality are total hypocrites when it is something dear to them. Unsurprisingly because such individuals tend to lean conservative and therefore act like conservatives- i.e., selfishly hypocritical.

girlparts observed:

And, of course, members of underrepresented minorities are much less likely to be able to benefit from knowing someone famous etc.

During one of my science training stops I was in a Department that had a couple of these anti-affirmative action type established Professors. They were loud and confident so we were under no illusions whatsoever about what they thought about a whole host of things. They were walking reddit threads* long before reddit was a thing.

Relevant to this tale is that there were two individuals hired during my association with that Department that were widely and almost openly derided as "dean's hire" affirmative action appointments. Particularly by the aforementioned rightwinger Defenders of Quality but you tended to hear it from everyone. EveryoneKnows(tm) They Are AffirmativeAction Hires That We Wouldn't Have Hired Save For The Dean.

Of course they were generally shit on by the department. I was not privvy to specific details but I watched as they got crappy space (literally in the basement), nobody seemed to want to collaborate and they always seemed to struggle to get access to resources. Both of them eventually left. This, bad as it is, is not the main point of the tale.

The main point is that a few years later there was a non-minority hire in the department. She had trained in the department and that alone was a tiny bit eyebrow raising because the Department definitely had the ethos of geographic nomadism being the best. It goes without saying that some of the Defenders of Quality were had been the loudest about how surely we could not hire our own trainees or anybody too well-associated with the department! That would compromise our quality.

But even better was the fact that soon after the hire it turned out that she was engaged to one of the established faculty. Naturally that guy was one of the jerkiest Defenders of Quality and most fervent Anti-Affirmative-Action Warriors. The most reddit of walking reddit threads. And here he was, engineering the tenure track Assistant Professor appointment of his soon-to-be spouse.

Of course the tale gets even better. There were at least four examples of women married to established professors in the department who had tried to get faculty appointments over the previous decade and a half. None of them got Asst Prof offers and had to settle for bad non-tenure track barely faculty appointments. They struggled along on the margins of slightly above adjunct teaching gigs and shoe string research activities. So on the one hand, of course this couple that pulled it off had to be totally secret about their relationship until after she'd gotten hired.

OTOH... oooooh, baby there were some angry folks.

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*thanks to someone who may or may not choose to self-identify in the comments for this little gem

An extended discussion is going on and there are a few things of interest to me that are emerging.

What IS a "staff scientist"? Does it have a defined role? How is it used both formally by institutions and in less formal career-expectation space? How is it viewed by the hiring PI? How is it viewed by postdocs?

Is it, or should it be, a mere evolution of a postdoc after a certain interval of time (e.g., 5 years)?

Is it, or should it be, in part a job-job where a person is hired to do one sciencey thing (generate data from this assay)?

Is it, or should it be, a job where the person "merely" does as the PI instructs at all times?

Does it come with supervisory responsibilities? Is part of the deal to remove this person from ever having to consider grant-getting?

Is permanence of the job in a way that is not the case with postdocs an implied or explicit condition of the job title?

Take care of yourself and your family first, folks. The next four years are going to be a bumpy ride for decent people.

Secure your situation. Take the job, take the money. Hunker down.

I really hate to say this but lab-wise it might be time to trim the sails too. Play for no-cost extensions of that grant, no telling what the glorious future of Precision Medicine Initiatives, BRAINI and the like holds for regular R01 budgets.

DM, what's your reasoning behind advocating for reducing grad student numbers instead of just bottlenecking at the PD phase? I'd argue that grad students currently get a pretty good deal (free degree and reasonable stipend), and so are less exploited. Also, scientific training is useful in many other endeavors, and so the net benefit to society is to continue training grad students.

For some people in the world of academic science, it is a big deal to "get scooped".

What does this mean?

It is generally when someone publishes a paper that reports a finding that is identical, or similar, to the work you hope to publish.

Publishing first, for many of us, has important beneficial implications. It can mean the difference in which journal will publish your work. The ones higher on the journal totem pole will be least likely to publish your work if it is similar to something that has already been published. They all will sneer, at least a little, at direct replications.

This can be as ridiculous as a 2 week difference in submission date for two papers that obviously took many years worth of effort to produce, btw.

It can be the deciding factor for who gets the lasting credit for a given discovery or demonstration, garning preferential citations, approval and appreciation.

In some cases, due to the preferences of the collaborators or the supervising PI this can be the difference in publishing your work at all. "If we can't publish in Nature or Science, then we won't publish at all!" goes the thinking in some quarters. (I know, I know..... if you aren't as familiar with this it seems idiotic. It is. I know. But it still exists. Replication? That's for the little people.)

Getting scooped is the easier* determination.

The harder question is deciding if someone intentionally scooped you.

I'm here to tell you that the accusations of intentional scooping run far in advance of the actual existence of it. But, it does exist. Of course. People can certainly choose what to work on based on knowledge of what you are doing. They can alter their allocation of resources to a project based on knowledge of how close you are to publishing. They can rush a manuscript to a journal earlier than they might have otherwise done based on knowing your timeline. And, of course, they can intentionally slow your progress if they happen to get your manuscript to review by delaying submitting their reviews, by demanding additional experimentation and by recommending rejection from a particular journal .

It is possible.

But it does not seem to me to be possible that this is the case for all of the accusations I hear from people that another lab intentionally scooped, or tried to scoop, their project.

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*Not "easy" because it isn't cut and dried what reflects an actual scoop. Many different pieces in your average research article these days. Unlikely that two groups come up with precisely identical manuscripts.